THE 'ANARTISTE' 'MACHINE DE GUERRE' OF GILLE DELEUZE

2016

The present writing was drafted and read by Obsolete Capitalism on the occasion of the ninth International Conference of Deleuze Studies in Rome last July 2016 at the department of Philosophy, Communication and Visual Arts of Roma Tre University. The edition, organized by Daniela Angelucci and Ivelise Perniola in collaboration with Deleuze Studies Journal, edited by Ian Buchanan for the Edinburgh University Press, was entitled "Virtuality, Becoming and Life". The essay Deleuze and the Algorithm of the Revolution was presented on the 13th July in the panel Countless Life For a Liberation of Thought Wherever It Is Imprisoned, proposed by the online journal of philosophy La Deleuziana. In the appendix of the book it is the introduction to the panel by Paolo Vignola and Sara Baranzoni and the participants’ abstracts: Emilia Marra, Alexander Wilson, Anaïs Nony, Benoît Dillet, Sara Baranzoni, Obsolete Capitalism, Paolo Vignola. Obsolete Capitalism thanks the organizational team of the conference in Rome, the editors of Deleuze Studies Journal and Deleuze Connections and Plateaus - New Directions in Deleuze Studies of the Edinburgh University Press, the participants to the pa- nel, the journal “La Deleuziana” and the eager attending audience.

Contemporary Political Theory, 2005

Deleuze and Anarchism, ed. Chantelle Gray Van Heerden and Aragorn Eloff, 2019

The notion that Deleuze is an ‘anarchist’ thinker – or, at the very least, that his thought may be interpreted in whole or in part as an expression of ‘anarchistic’ sensibilities – is said to originate with Todd May’s formative volume The Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism (1994).Since that time, May’s thesis has become something of a truism among certain students of Deleuze, especially those who identify with the broad and loosely defined movement known as ‘postanarchism’, and has inspired similar claims regarding Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Levinas, Rancière and other thinkers (Koch 1993; Jun 2007; Verter 2010; May 2011; Absensour 2013). One of the most often cited criticisms of such claims is that the figures in question were not associated in any meaningful sense with the historical anarchist movement and did not identify themselves as anarchists. The underlying assumption here is that the term ‘anarchist’ is anchored in a specific tradition characterised by a fixed set of principles, in which case it is incorrectly applied to Deleuze and other thinkers who at best express an affinity with some of these principles or else are interpreted as doing so. For some critics, at least, this further implies that the thinkers in question are completely unrelated to anarchism and, by extension, that it is altogether inappropriate to discuss them in this context. Drawing on ideas from Michael Freeden’s theory of ideology, I contend that the anarchist tradition is better understood as a constellation of diffuse and evolving concepts than as a fixed set of principles. This, in turn, invites a crucial distinction between what I call ‘anarchist’ thought – that is, thought that emerges within and in response to historical anarchist movements – and ‘anarchistic’ thought – that is, thought that emerges outside such movements but is conceptually proximate to core anarchist commitments. Inasmuch as the latter has often played a significant role in the historical development of the former, and vice versa, neither can be fully understood apart from the other. As I will argue, this is precisely how we ought to understand Deleuze in relation to the broad anarchist tradition.

This paper calls into question the privilege granted to creativity by most commentators on Deleuze by demonstrating the priority of ethics over creation in relation to the concept of the image. It takes up Jacque Derrida’s “grumble” about the central place of creativity in Deleuze, showing how this grumble is applicable to influential readers of Deleuze including Anne Sauvagnargues, Ronald Bogue and John Protevi. Another reading of Deleuze will be given which calls the priority of creation into question, rescuing Deleuze from Derrida’s grumble. Deleuze’s notion of the image will be put into a tradition of thinking the relationship between light and appearance which runs from Plato through Bergson, Heidegger and Derrida. The notion of the image as the basic material of existence is then explained to be a passive fusion of external elements and shown to be made more consistent from Difference and Repetition to Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. The paper will then show how the “good” image in Plato is fundamentally constructed based on a moral motivation, on Deleuze’s reading in Difference and Repetition. The “good” image is one which resembles the Idea which remains identical to itself over time. A Thousand Plateaus will then be called upon to demonstrate how this self-same Idea is in fact the universalization of that which remains the identical to itself in the world, that is, the Idea universalizes a purely conservative social organization which eliminates all that differs from itself. In this way, Plato institutes the moral interpretation of the world which forms a moral image of thought. Deleuze’s ethical images will be precisely those which force thought to see the intolerability of the exclusionary social organizations it universalizes. After outlining Deleuze’s notion of the splitting of time in Cinema 2: The Time-Image, we will show how the body links humanity to this splitting of time because it causes the present to collapse when it is exhausted. The bodies which are fatigued and wiped out in the present organization of social space must be given voice in a speech-act which forces thought to see the impossibility of living in the present for certain bodies. Ultimately, thought must be made to see its own embodiment, in the brain, and thus see how the boundaries it imposes upon bodies prevent its own operation outside of the strict boundaries of the dominant reality. However, it will be shown that the vision thought has of its own impossibility is constantly being buried in the past, whilst new intolerable worlds are continually arising anew. In this light, we will end with Derrida’s sensitive insight that, for Deleuze, the best thought, the best philosophy, the best writing is not concerned with the creation of the new in itself, but rather is continually haunted by the impossibility of thought and the ethical horrors of stupidity.

Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia "Becoming-Revolutionary" colloquium organized by Daniela Voss December 6th, 2016 a revolutionary people and the war-machine (Fr. machine de guerre) With regard to the two species of violence (i.e., mythical-foundational and legal-conservative) in the Treatise on Nomadology, Deleuze and Guattari argue that historically the " State-Form " has employed only two choices in order to distinguish between them: first, it fashioned a special part of its own apparatus that is specifically invented to apply a certain expression of violence that is directed against its own citizens (i.e., its police forces, its prisons, its judges, its teachers and bureaucrats, basically, all those functionaries who are made responsible for both maintaining and reproducing the various kinds of state violence); second, it must acquire an army (machine de guerre). 1 Accordingly, the existence of the war-machine is not intrinsic to the form of state power itself, since the function of state power is to conserve and to protect, even to replenish, the organs of state power; whereas, the nature of the violence deployed by the war-machine is not conservative, but essentially destructive, since its sole objective is to destroy the enemy by laying waste to his organs thus preventing him to either conserve or reproduce his own body proper.

2010

The topic of my thesis is the notion of existence as an encounter, as developed in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995). What this denotes is a critical stance towards a major current in Western philosophical tradition which Deleuze nominates as representational thinking. Such thinking strives to provide a stable ground for identities by appealing to transcendent structures "behind" the apparent reality and explaining the manifest diversity of the given by such notions as essence, idea, God, or totality of the world. In contrast to this, Deleuze states that abstractions such as these do not explain anything, but rather that they need to be explained. Yet, Deleuze does not appeal merely to the given. He sees that one must posit a genetic element that accounts for experience, and this element must not be "naïvely" traced from the empirical. Deleuze nominates his philosophy as "transcendental empiricism" and he seeks to bring together the approaches of both empiricism and transcendental philosophy. In chapter one I look into the motivations of Deleuze's transcendental empiricism and analyse it as an encounter between Deleuze's readings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This encounter regards, first of all, the question of subjectivity. Deleuze takes from Hume an orientation towards the specificity of empirical sensibility, while Kant provides Deleuze a basic framework for an account of the emergence of the empirical. The conditions of experience must be situated within the immanence of the world and, accordingly, understood as changing. What this amounts to is a conception of identity as nonessential process. A pre-given concept of identity does not explain the nature of things, but the concept itself must be explained. From this point of view, the process of individualization must become the central concern. In chapter two I discuss Deleuze's concept of the affect as the basis of identity and his affiliation with the theories of Gilbert Simondon and Jakob von Uexküll. From this basis develops a morphogenetic theory of individuation-as-process. In analysing such a process of individuation, the modal category of the virtual becomes of great value, being an open, indeterminate "charge" of potentiality. As the virtual concerns becoming or the continuous process of actualisation, then time, rather than space, will be the privileged field of consideration. Chapter three is devoted to the discussion of the temporal aspect of the virtual and difference-without-identity. The work of Bergson regarding the nature of time is especially important to Deleuze. As "pure" time is heterogeneous, the essentially temporal process of subjectification results in a conception of the subject as composition: an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. Therefore art and aesthetic experience is valued by Deleuze because they disclose the construct-like nature of subjectivity in the sensations they produce. Through the domain of the aesthetic the subject is immersed in the network of affectivity that is the material diversity of the world. Chapter four addresses a phenomenon displaying this diversified indentity: the simulacrum. Both Deleuze and Jean Baudrillard use the concept in order to emphasise an identity that is not grounded in an essence. However, I see a decisive difference between them. Developed on the basis of the simulacrum, a theory of identity as assemblage emerges in chapter five. As the problematic of simulacra concerns perhaps foremost the artistic presentation, I shall look into the identity of a work of art as assemblage. To take an example of a concrete artistic practice and to remain within the problematic of the simulacrum, I shall finally address the question of reproductionparticularly in the case recorded music-and its identity regarding the work of art. In conclusion, I propose that by overturning its initial representational schema, phonographic music addresses its own medium and turns it into an inscription of difference, exposing the listener to an encounter with the virtual.

Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology

In response to suggestions that Deleuze and Guattari are the “enemy” of companion species, this essay explores the tension between Donna Haraway’s attacks against Deleuze and Guattari and their philosophy of becoming animal. The essay goes on to contextualize Deleuze and Guattari’s statements against pet-owners through a discussion of the psychoanalytical refiguration of desire and shows how their ostensible attack against pet owners fits into their larger critique against capitalism. The essay illustrates why Deleuze and Guattari and Haraway are more in agreement than first meets the eye, finding commensurability through Haraway’s early work on embryology. Becoming animal does not begin and end with either humans or animals and the essay explores the high stakes of focusing on intensities rather than actual animal bodies.

The Eroticisation of Biopower: Masochistic Relationality and Resistance in Deleuze and Agamben, 2019

This article examines Gilles Deleuze's and Giorgio Agamben's thought on the immanent creativity emergent from formal, impersonal life as a pathway for resistance to biopolitics. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze explores masochism as the inversion of the sadistic, biopolitical use of the body which can bring forth genuinely new expressions. Agamben dismisses masochistic creativity because it leaves the dialectical ontology of biopower intact to conceptualise his form-of-life as a space of indiscernibility between ontological essence and legal-political actualisation. For Agamben, the form-of-life escapes biopolitical capture because it is absolutely detached from its relations. This article argues that the radicalness of this detachment calls into question the political capacity offered by the form-of-life to actively change the relations of biopower. Against this background, Deleuze's masochistic eroticisation of power offers an alternative conceptualisation of relationality as external to its terms and productive of expressions which are both thoroughly immanent and genuinely creative.

The Poet and the Vampire: Roi Bombance and the Crisis of Symbolist Values 1 __________________________________ I n his influential Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger proposed an account of the rise of the historical avant-garde that has since become almost canonical. As is well known, for Bürger there is a necessary relationship between the revolutionary movements that populated the landscape of early twentieth-century European culture and late nineteenth-century aestheticism, since it was aestheticism that laid bare the conditions of existence of art in bourgeois society against which the avant-garde revolted. Aestheticism's rallying cry of "art for art's sake," its call for the complete autonomy of art from "the praxis of life," to use Bürger's vocabulary, is at once a demand to distinguish art from the materialistic, instrumental pursuits of the dominant class and an acknowledgement of "art's lack of social impact" (22). To put it simply, the consummation of the divorce of art from life with fin-de-siècle aestheticism made it possible for the cultural movements that followed to call into question not only specific artistic practices -the schools and tendencies that, having had their moment of glory, receded into the distance of tradition -but rather art as an institution, that is, as the complex apparatus governing the production, distribution and reception of works of art. The cul-de-sac of aestheticism demands of the avantgarde a radically new beginning, one in which the reintegration of art and life is carried out not only at the level of content, as in some sort of new realism, but rather in terms of how art functions in society. Both aestheticism and the avant-garde reject the means-ends rationality of the bourgeois world: what distinguishes the avant-garde is that it does not also, as a consequence, reject life praxis, but rather attempts, in Bürger's famous dictum, "to organize a new life praxis from a basis in art" (49).

The article investigates two contemporary propositions that it seeks to dismantle: 1. The proposition “everything is political” that it takes as one of the crucial implication of the concept of biopolitics. 2. The proposition “all art is political” that it takes to be a defense mechanism against the insight of the indefensibility of proposition 1. The article demonstrates how both propositions ultimately unfold from the mythic assumption of a givenness of politics and/or art and it concludes by suggesting that only a complete suspension of any kind of givenness might be a preparation for true politics or art to come. This preparation the article delineates as fatalist preparation.

Abstract: Kant considered the sphere of taste a privileged setting for a social manifestation of the Enlightenment's aspiration to an agreement on ethical behavior. This universal validity depended on the subjective feeling of belonging to Humanity in general, called by Kant sensus communis. The avant-gardes linked the Kantian idea of an autonomous art to their emancipation project, taking their critical task as a guarantee for an ethical change, in common with political ideas like “progress” or “Revolution”. But the implications of what is considered by some to be Kant’s failed ambition to bring the ideal of the Enlightenment to completion, are visible in the art sphere not just in the critical basis of the historical avant-gardes, but also in the aesthetic ground on which subjectivity has survived in contemporary art. The conceptual basis which would be later developed by the artistic avant-gardes was settled by German Romantic and Idealist thought, whose utopian dimension could be easily recognized in The Oldest System-Program of German Idealism (1796), a text which provided Idealist thought with the claim of a new rationality or a mythology of reason in Hegel, an intellectual intuition in Schelling or the Humanity in Schiller. Although the emancipation project of the avant-gardes has lost its credibility for us, the idea of this article is not to discuss the possibility of an ethical implication of art or to see to what extent today’s art can maintain a social function, but to point out certain idealist concepts in light of a philosophy of art modeled along lines sketched out in Kant’s Critique of Judgement and that have contributed to the history of avant-gardes.

2015

Wales, is perhaps best known for his translation of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994), although he has made other notable efforts on behalf of disseminating continental thought, including translating Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1995), editing Deleuze: A Critical Reader for the Blackwell Critical Readers Series (1996), and editing the untimely Nietzsche, Feminism and Political Theory (1993). In addition, Patton has written a number of excellent, widely-reproduced papers in which he backlights key, load-bearing concepts from Deleuze and Guattari such as “the War Machine, ” “the event, ” and “difference,” while preserving their shadowy idiosyncratic beauty as only a scholar of Patton’s calibre can do. Eugene Holland succeeds similarly well with concepts from Anti-Oedipus in his Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: Introduction to Schizoanalysis (1999).